It's always refreshing when you work with a vendor that provides good service. Today's example of this is Versys Corp. Versys makes legal specific products for accounting (Legal Insight), time and billing (AboutTime) and enterprise contact management (Intellipad) as well as some other software. They are a smaller firm based in San Francisco, but with offices in the East Coast as well.
I can't say whether their software products are better than their competitors (although our controller says that their software stacks up quite well in price, features and performance to the other legal specific accounting packages out there), but I can say that their people provide excellent service on a timely basis.
For example, we recently upgraded from the older 16 bit version of AboutTime to the newer 32 bit version. Planning for the upgrade was started about a month and a half ago. Installation on the server of the new software was done about 3 weeks before cutover. About a week before cutover, it was discovered that the user & accounts data did not get imported properly, so we had to work to get the vendor the data so they could import it properly, which they were able to do promptly. Also, our controller made clear that she wanted to test how the new software connects to the Accounting system, so the testing systems had to be put in place at the 11th hour.
The conversion went off well, the controller got everyone trained and we are now on the new software. During this whole thing, the support person at Versys (her name is Debbie) was calm and courteous and did everything that she could to make sure that the transition was smooth.
I should note that the upgrade was tried by the previous IT person about 20 months ago, unsuccessfully. Although most of those problems were caused by lack of testing on the part of that person along with some bugs with the software that needed to be remedied and were. Took us this long to redo the conversion because of all the other things that I have been involved in and we wanted to make absolutely sure that none of the problems at the first go-around happened this time, which they didn't. As far as I can tell, the problems with the first attempt, lay mostly with the IT person that the firm had at the time. She didn't like the software (for some reason she wanted to use Great Plains...in a law firm) and was pretty uncooperative with the people at Versys and pretty much wanted the whole thing to fail (she wasn't really in the loop in choosing the software and from what I understand, did not like this fact).
Anyhow, we are also having them help us streamline our records management systems as well as our conflict checking (Legal Insight does both of these things pretty well, which will allow us to have single point of entry and storage for Client/Matter info) which should help us out a lot in how we manage our data. The current hodgepodge of systems is a pretty big mess that require changes to be made in something like 7 different places, most of which can be automated through the Legal Insight system.
Every time we have had an issue, the people at Versys have worked dilligently to get it fixed and in most cases have resolved the issues promptly. The one time when they couldn't it was an issue with how Windows XP shares printers and wasn't really their issue. That was resolved by putting the printer on a print server box.
At any rate, the point of this posting was that the people at Versys provide viable products for law firms and have excellent staff to support you in fully implementing their software, tools and services.
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